2018 charging speed compared to battery temp gauge

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TexasLeaf

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 21, 2018
Messages
115
Location
Texas
People that don’t have LeafSpy have a difficult time comparing the bars on the 2018 Leaf battery temperature gauge to what charging speed they can expect. I developed the table below to help people trying to figure their potential charge speed with only the battery temperature gauge.

Code:
       Min temp      Max temp   Max pwr   Min pwr
Bars   F (C)         F (C)        kW      kW
0      none          23 (-5)      ?       ?
1      5 (-15)       28 (-2)      ?       ?
2      10 (-12)      36 (2)       ?       ?
3      18 (-8)       39 (4)       ?       ?
4      23 (-5)       59 (15)      ?       45
5      27 (-3)       81 (27)      ?       45
6      50 (10)       100 (38)     45      29
7      73 (23)       117 (47)     45      20
8      97 (36)       120 (49)     33      17
9      117 (47)      126 (52)     20      14
10     120 (49)      133 (56)     17      11
11     126 (52)      138 (59)     14      11
12     133 (56)      none         11      ?

As you can see from the table, there is a pretty large temperature range for each bar and is a considerable amount of overlap with other bars. The information on battery temperature related to bars was extracted for the Electric Vehicle Wiki website, http://www.electricvehiclewiki.com/Battery#Battery_Temperature_Gauge. The information on battery charge rate related to battery temperature was extracted from the 22:05 mark of Lemon-Tea Leaf’s “40kWh Nissan Leaf 2018 - 376.1 miles (605.2 km) nonstop to Fully Charged Live Show in Silverstone” video;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgrbT_YxhMs

and from a graph on the Clean Technica “2018 Leaf vs Long Journeys — Can It Take The Heat” article, https://cleantechnica.com/2018/07/16/2018-leaf-vs-long-journeys-can-it-take-the-heat/.

There was not any information for charging speeds below 54 F (12 C) or above 127 F (53 C) so that’s why there are question marks on the table. I know from personal experience that charge speeds can go down as low as 11 kW when the battery gets up to 11 bars so that’s data I added. Below is the battery charge rate versus battery temperature information extracted Lemon-Tea Leaf’s video.

Code:
Temp		Max Power
F (C)	   kW
75 (24)	 45
86 (30)	 45
90 (32)	 40
93 (34)	 36
95 (35)	 36
97 (36)	 33
100 (38)	29
102 (39)	28
104 (40)	28
109 (43)	27
113 (45)	22
117 (47)	20
120 (49)	17
123 (51)	14

The information above does not account for the performance of individual CHAdeMO chargers. If you want a more accurate information on your battery temperature than is available from the battery temperature gauge then you probably need to invest in LeafSpy. I hope Leaf owners and operators will find this information useful in managing their fast charging on long trips.
 
Since the bars can't really be read individually, I suggest you convert bars to a percentage of the gauge covered by the temperature "band" or "strip." Halfway between Hot and Cold would be 50%, for example. Or just tell me how many "bars" the 2018 Leaf has and I'll do it.
 
LeftieBiker said:
Since the bars can't really be read individually, I suggest you convert bars to a percentage of the gauge covered by the temperature "band" or "strip." Halfway between Hot and Cold would be 50%, for example. Or just tell me how many "bars" the 2018 Leaf has and I'll do it.

The 2018 Leaf has the same number of "bars" or segments as all the previous Leafs, 12. There are two bars in the blue region, eight bars in the white region and two bars in the red region. When six bars are activated the "gauge" indicates right in the middle.

There are no gaps between bars on the battery temperature gauge of the 2018 Leaf like there were on the previous Leaf models, so it's easy to get fooled into thinking it's a linear gauge. But if you watch the 2018 Leaf gauge closely it's easy to spot the gauge jumping from 6 to 7 bars, from 7 to 8 bars and so on. I was fooled when I first bought my 2018 Leaf but now I realized the temperature gauge on the 2018 Leaf is basically the same gauge as on all the previous Leafs
 
So we have the same 12 bars, with 50% of the gauge "covered" equaling 6 bars. That's the best way to explain it to people, rather than have them try to read the unreadable individual bars as with past Leafs.
 
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